Issue date: 11/10/09 Section: Film & Music

Photo: Zentropa Entertainments" SRC="http://media.collegepublisher.com/media/paper404/stills/e08lq83a.jpg" > An eerie atmosphere surrounds "Eden" as Gainsbourg looks on in despair Photo: Zentropa Entertainments

Like all great directors, Lars von Trier is always ready to take a risk and make a movie we've never really seen before. Any cinema enthusiast would have had to be living under a rock to miss the avalanche of controversy that greeted his latest picture at every film festival on the planet. Yes, Antichrist is as outrageous and brutal as it has been described to be. But, unfortunately, that might be all there is to this bête noire.

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe are excellent in their roles, playing a nameless couple whose son tumbles to death from a window while they make love. Seem fucked up? It gets worse: she falls into a coma at the child's funeral, and he tries to exorcise her mixture of grief and fear by returning to a cabin called "Eden." Something terrifying happened there the summer before, and the more Dafoe's character tries to banish his wife's fear, the more both humans descend into primal violence as the wilderness closes in around them. As an animatronic fox aptly puts it, "Chaos reigns."

The film is split into four chapters: Grief, Pain (Chaos Reigns), Despair (Gynocide), and Three Beggars. These are framed by a breathlessly elegant prologue and epilogue. Some sequences, such as Gainsbourg's ghostly walk through the woods or the child's almost gentle fall through excruciating slow-motion, are dazzling. Von Trier's camera follows the couple with a shaky unease and the sparse but jarring soundtrack makes your ears curl when your eyes are already burning.

This brings me to the violence. Although certainly graphic, Antichrist is made particularly terrifying because the bloodshed and its traces linger on-screen. You have to be able to handle your stomach during some scenes and your nerves during others - this film horrifies on both the visceral and psychological level.

What I think outraged audiences most was not the violence itself, but the lack of basis for the violence. This film is truly baffling because of its lack of purpose. What is von Trier trying to say? Is nature, as Gainsbourg's character declares, really Satan's church? Is the wilderness a metaphor for humanity's inner darkness, or man's eternal struggle with nature? References are made to pagan-worshiping women massacred in the Medieval Ages. Does the increasingly vicious/sexual relationship between husband and wife reveal the base carnality of relationships?

The questions pile on. If I were reviewing the next Saw gorefest, I would not be asking for a thematic message, but here the scenes are too carefully crafted and deliberately paced to be a slasher flick. There must have been something underlying the blood that seeps from frame to frame, and von Trier is too smart a director to create a film so aggressive without a thesis.

Or maybe there isn't any overall message. Maybe I am looking too hard for something that's not there. Von Trier called the experience of shooting the film his "psychotherapy" to combat bouts of depression, and perhaps this film is his cinematic psychiatrist's couch. If so, then this project is nothing more than artistic masturbation- a word that recalls a few scenes.

In his other works, the Danish auteur has been sensationalist and shocking, but there has always been some method to his madness. The director of Dogville, The Idiots, and Europa presents us with a garbled and grisly collection of images that suggest a million meditations on sex, men, women, humans, nature, and God. But those meditations, like the child on the windowsill, tumble to their death in a film that cannot justify its excesses.

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